The first three episodes of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror were among the coolest television I've ever watched, and images and ideas from those three one-hour playlets often pop into my head at inopportune moments. So there's no way to overstate my excitement for the second batch of three episodes, coming sometime soon.

Be Right Back: Hayley Atwell plays Martha, whose boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) is a "social media addict." They decide to move to a cottage in the middle of nowhere, but then Ash is killed returning the moving van. At the funeral, Martha's friend Sarah (Sinead Matthews) tells her that they can create a real-seeming version of Ash out of all his previous social media updates. At first, Martha is grossed out, but eventually she goes along with it — and then she discovers she's pregnant. And she decides to write back to one of the emails she's gotten from the artificial, posthumous version of Ash.

Advertisement

The Waldo Moment: A failed comedian named Jamie (Daniel Rigby) is the voice of a blue bear named Waldo who interviews celebrities and politicians on television, ostensibly as a children's show — but actually, it's for a late night comedy program. Waldo the Bear becomes popular enough to get his own TV pilot — and then a producer comes up with the idea of having Waldo run for Parliament against one of the politicians he's targeted. At a debate, the Conservative politician taunts Jamie, who responds that Waldo the Bear is less artificial than most actual politicians. This rant becomes a YouTube sensation, and soon there's a distinct possibility that a big blue bear could win a Parliamentary seat.

White Bear: On the face of it, this sounds like your garden-variety post-apocalyptic scenario, but there's probably more to it than meets the eye. Toni (Being Human's Lenora Crichlow) wakes up with amnesia in a house she doesn't recognize. And when she goes outside, everyone is filming her with their smartphones. Except for one guy, who points a gun at her and tries to kill her. She meets up with two people, Damien (Ian Bonar) and Jem (Tuppence Middleton), and they hide in a gas station. Toni learns this has been going on for months — a mysterious signal has turned most people into "mindless voyeurs," while a few people who can resist the signal do whatever they want... including hunting people like Toni, Jem and Damien to the death. Toni decides to try and find the source of the signal, so she can disable it before she's murdered.

Oh, and there's a great quote from Brooker, who describes Black Mirror as being about "the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy."